


The Sugarplum Chase

by MarkoftheAsphodel



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 03:57:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17911580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MarkoftheAsphodel/pseuds/MarkoftheAsphodel
Summary: Every country in Jugdral eats sugarplums at the winter festival. The trouble is, every country has its own idea of what a “sugarplum” is. Just one more complication for a holiday in exile…





	The Sugarplum Chase

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sitting on a draft of this for YEARS but it got a kick in the tail when a recently translated interview indicated that the FE4 devs did indeed intend Agustria to be French in flavor, Grannvale to be German, Silesse to be Scandinavian...and Leonster to be ITALIAN despite the sky-high levels of fake-Irish going on there. So I retooled this little bit of sugar and fluff and finally finished it. Takes place in the same continuity as "While You Were Sleeping" and its sequels but reading that isn't necessary for this one-shot.

He was being perfectly useless at the moment, and it made Finn even more displeased at himself. He’d spent at least two hours sitting by the window, staring out at the snow-capped towers of Sailane in the dim afternoon, a stack of letters for Prince Quan sitting unopened next to his empty glass of _wodka_. And he hadn’t even enjoyed the _wodka_.

What Finn ought to do— other than process his lord’s correspondence, of course— was to go see how Lady Lachesis was faring that particular winter day. 

She stood by the opened window of her sitting room despite the bitter cold outside, but this time Finn didn’t even mention the window. The last time he’d argued with her over it, she’d claimed that her present condition left her overheated and the cold air on her skin was refreshing, and this was something he had no means of disputing. (Also her present condition was entirely his own fault, though for some reason he’d escaped blame for it as all in their company behaved as though Lachesis had spontaneously gotten with child through some act of the gods.)

“I find myself desiring sugarplums,” she said, not shifting her gaze from the window.

“I’ll bring some,” he replied, a little relieved at having been provided so early an exit from the conversation.

It might be possible to fulfill the promise. It more probably wasn’t.

Sugarplums back home in Leonster meant balls of sweet marzipan, molded and painted into perfect miniature fruit. No winter festival could be complete without a small tree decorated with a miraculous outburst of golden pears, blushing peaches and soft violet-hued plums, each studded with a clove to serve as a stem. What Lachesis meant by “sugarplums” though was something entirely different— small perfect plums ripened beneath the Agustrian sun, boiled in a sugar syrup until they’d turned translucent and resembled precious gems more than fruit. Finn nearly cracked a tooth on his first Agustrian sugarplum because he didn’t realize the jewel-like delicacy came with its stone intact.

Finn sighed and buttoned up his coat and went off to do the right thing, as small a gesture as it might be. The first confectioner’s shop he encountered in Sailane had a pink and plump marzipan pig in the window amid towers of frosted gingerbread. The pig bore a fondant mushroom in its mouth and strands of candied angelica “grass” around its hooves. This artistry looked promising and so Finn went in and asked the lady behind the counter for sugarplums. She smiled and brought out a tray of sweets at once.

They looked almost like Agustrian sugarplums, though instead of a glistening surface like polished garnet and topaz these boasted a crust of glittering sugar. Finn, mindful of his limited funds at that moment, asked for just one to sample. They came in several colors and Finn let instinct guide him toward a reddish-purple one that resembled the plums of Leonster and not the green and golden ones of the western kingdoms.

Disenchantment lurked beneath that sugar crust. This was not a candied plum. It was some sort of jellied candy that tasted of plums, formed in the shape of a plum. Finn quite liked it, but he doubted it would make Lachesis happy. So as not to annoy the shop attendant he purchased a small bag of almond toffee in hopes it would be half as good as the _crocante_ back home and so please Lady Ethlyn’s sweet tooth.

The next confectioner’s shop specialized in licorice shapes. Finn had already experienced the salty licorice of Silesse thanks to Prince Lewyn and his pranks and had no desire to go through that again, but he noticed some chocolate bonbons amid the licorice fish and pegasi and asked the elderly man behind this shop’s counter for sugarplums. These proved to be smooth domes of dark chocolate, quite unlike any sugarplum of Finn’s experience, and again Finn asked for a sample.

He tasted plums beneath that bitter shell, to be sure, but Finn also tasted enough plum _brandy_ that he was quite certain this wasn’t close to what Lachesis wanted. It might, however, please Lord Quan and so he bought a small box of them. As the clerk wrapped up the box, Finn asked if any confectioner’s in Sailane might specialize in _foreign_ sweets.

“What, you don’t like Pegasus Moss?” asked the aged clerk. Finn didn’t know what that was and given what Sailane licorice was like he didn’t want to know. 

“I want to buy a lady something to remind her of home,” he said. “Home is southern Agustria.” 

“Southern…” said the clerk, and then his eyes brightened. “Try Roshanara’s.” 

Finn followed the old clerk’s directions to the other end of town, where a storefront bright in scarlet and gold stood out against the snowy streets. 

“Roshanara’s Bazaar,” he said to himself. 

This was most definitely not a place he’d go hunting for sweets on his own. It looked like a furniture store, or perhaps a toy shop, or perhaps a place to buy bric-a-brac. The short Silessian day meant the sky had already begun to darken and so Finn sighed to himself and went inside. There he found a whirlwind of carpets, tapestries, vases, and garden ornaments. In the middle of this stood a small woman with a dark braid going down her back.

“Excuse me?” asked Finn.

The woman turned and Finn had to quickly conceal his surprise on seeing a Verdanese person up here in the frozen north. 

“Might you have any candy from Agustria? I mean, might you have any sugarplums like they have in Agustria?”

“I have something that’s what you want but better,” she said in a brisk but not unkind voice, and Finn followed her to the back of the long and narrow shop because he didn’t really have another option by now.

The back of the shop overflowed with coffees, teas, honeys, jams… and candy. Finn saw molded chocolate seashells filled with praline from southern Grannvale, almonds coated in silver and gold just like in Miletos, and slabs of thick nougat studded with hazelnuts and pistachios imported from his very home of Leonster. Finn stopped in his paces for a moment, staring at the creamy nougat and imagining the familiar taste of honey and nuts on his tongue. 

“This is what you need,” said the shopkeeper, and she produced a small round wooden box. Under the lid lay a frill of white paper, and under that nestled seven sugarplums, each the pale green of a peridot gem. “Preserved plums from northern Verdane of the highest quality anywhere.”

“I believe those might be exactly what I need,” said Finn, though the price the shopkeeper quoted took almost all the gold in his pocket.

“This is the very last I have in stock and it is impossible to get more on account of the war.”

“I’m sorry… to hear that,” Finn corrected himself, lest the shopkeeper realize he had any personal connection to any wars in northern Verdane.

“I have heard many plum orchards were burned by soldiers,” she said, and though the shopkeeper had the mien of a stern but fair school teacher, Finn felt she knew all too well that he was affiliated with the very same Lord Sigurd who’d conquered Verdane and then Agustria before taking refuge in Sailane. “I hope these are for someone truly special.”

“They are.” 

And so Finn paid for the sugarplums and also spent the very last of his money on a stick of nougat from Leonster before retreating from Roshanara’s Bazaar as quickly as he feasibly could. He bit into the nougat as he hurried back through the streets of Sailane to the castle, hoping the sweet taste of home would banish thoughts of plum trees burning. He couldn’t get very far before feeling it was caught in his throat.

“You’ve taken your time,” observed Lachesis as Finn arrived again at her door, the sugarplum box clutched in both hands.

“I got you the last ones in Silesse,” he said through chattering teeth as his boots dripped slush onto her carpet.

Lachesis extended a hand and opened the lid of the box, then peeled back the frill of paper to expose the sugarplums. In the firelight they looked even more like orbs of polished peridot. Lachesis took the central one in the box between her thumb and forefinger and popped it into her mouth. 

“These taste just like I remember,” she said around the pit. “Thank you.”

A sentence hovered on the edge of Finn’s tongue, something like “No one will ever taste this again but you because the orchards all burned and it was probably us burning them but you’re having the last in the entire world because you’re worth it.”

What he said, condensed to its essence, was, “She said to give them to someone truly special.”

“She?”

“Roshanara.”

“I think you’ve been out wandering in the cold a little too long,” Lachesis said after taking a moment to consider him.

But she came out of her room and ordered up a little holiday tea with all the sweets Finn acquired in the course of his day, and Prince Quan and Princess Ethlyn and Lord Sigurd joined them to partake of the almond toffee and the plum-brandy bonbons and the leftover nougat. For a moment, the five of them could pretend they weren’t all stranded far from home in the cold and the dark, pretend Lord Eldigan was merely elsewhere and not buried at Silvail. 

Finn looked across at Lachesis as the very last sugarplum entered her mouth, watched as her lips formed satisfied smile and her hand stole upward to rest for just a moment on the curve of her belly.

 _Truly special. Worth it._

Even if all he could give her today was a box of sweets, someday… 

**The End**

**Author's Note:**

> According to the Treasure artbook, pegasi eat a special kind of moss. I imagined Silesse as creating a spun-sugar candy in tribute to this moss. As for salty licorice... man, I like licorice but salty licorice was one of the worst candy experiences of my life. Ever.
> 
> I love sugarplums. All of them.


End file.
